Showing results by narrator "Ron Butler" in All Categories

More than ever, the effective management of technology is critical for business competitiveness. For decades, technology leaders have struggled to balance agility, reliability, and security. The consequences of failure have never been greater - whether it's the healthcare.gov debacle, cardholder data breaches, or missing the boat with Big Data in the cloud. And yet, high performers using DevOps principles, such as Google, Amazon, and Netflix, are routinely and reliably deploying code into production hundreds, or even thousands, of times per day.

Seventeen-time all-star; scorer of 81 points in a game; MVP; and a shooting guard second only to Jordan in league history: Kobe Bryant is one of basketball's absolute greatest players, a fascinating and complicated character who knew when he was a mere boy that he would be better than Jordan on the court. The debate about whether he achieved that is a furious one - but Kobe has surpassed Jordan on the all-time scoring list and has only one less championship than Jordan (five to Jordan's six).

Cannabis is at the very beginning of a craft and educational renaissance. It is emerging from the legislative shadows and a second awakening is occurring: people are proactively seeking information about how to properly consume and enjoy it. And cannabis is a wildly diverse product, even more so than alcohol. The Leafly Guide to Cannabis provides all the best tips to navigating this growing market in a definitive guide that will enhance every user's enjoyment and high.

In Cannabis Pharmacy, expert Michael Backes offers evidence-based information on using cannabis to treat an array of ailments and conditions. He provides information on how cannabis works with the body's own system, how best to prepare and administer it, and how to modify and control dosage. This newly revised edition is now completely up to date with the latest information on the body's encannabinoid system, which is now understood to control emotion, appetite, and memory, plus much more.

Private equity firms are on the rise and rapidly changing the game. Today, more than 5,500 PE firms own tens of thousands of companies, so it is essential for CEOs and senior management executives to understand exactly how private equity firms operate. This invaluable resource can help you devise a winning PE game plan for your own company that offers you greater freedom and financial success.

Ten years in the making, New Yorkers is a compulsively enjoyable portrait of New York that is as lively and vibrant as the city itself. Acclaimed writer and editor Craig Taylor ventured into nearly every corner of the city, getting some of its best talkers - rich and poor, old and young, native and immigrant - to share indelible tales about New York in our time. 

The world has never been so unstable. Now, more than ever, we need to understand our history, learn from our mistakes, and embrace science and technology as we push into the future. In his debut book, New Thinking: The Technology and Science That Transformed Our World, Dagogo Altraide of YouTube's ColdFusion breaks down the history of gamechanger breakthroughs in the world of science and technology that have shaped our modern world and will impact the future.   

In Oakland, California, in 1966, community college students Bobby Seale and Huey Newton armed themselves, began patrolling the police, and promised to prevent police brutality. Unlike the Civil Rights Movement that called for full citizenship rights for blacks within the US, the Black Panther Party rejected the legitimacy of the US government and positioned itself as part of a global struggle against American imperialism.

Medical Apartheid is the first and only comprehensive history of medical experimentation on African Americans. Starting with the earliest encounters between black Americans and Western medical researchers and the racist pseudoscience that resulted, it details the ways both slaves and freedmen were used in hospitals for experiments conducted without their knowledge - a tradition that continues today within some black populations.

In 1994, The Bell Curve and its controversial thesis catapulted the topic of genetic racial differences in IQ to the forefront of a renewed and heated debate. Now, in A Terrible Thing to Waste, award-winning science writer Harriet A. Washington adds her incisive analysis to the fray, arguing that IQ is a biased and flawed metric, but that it is useful for tracking cognitive damage. Featuring extensive scientific research and Washington's sharp, lively reporting, A Terrible Thing to Waste is sure to outrage, transform the conversation, and inspire debate.

In the middle of the night, a controversial US senator is found murdered in bed in his Georgetown pied-à-terre. The police turn up only one clue: a mysterious rhyme signed "Jack and Jill" promising that this is just the beginning. Jack and Jill are out to get the rich and famous, and they will stop at nothing until their fiendish plan is carried out. No one in Washington is safe - not children, not politicians, not even the president of the United States. Only Alex Cross has the skills and the courage to crack the case.

When Jaxon is sent to spend the day with a mean old lady his mother calls Ma, he finds out she's not his grandmother - but she is a witch! She needs his help delivering baby dragons to a magical world where they'll be safe. There are two rules when it comes to the dragons: Don't let them out of the bag, and don't feed them anything sweet. Before he knows it, Jax and his friends Vikram and Kavita have broken both rules! Will Jax get the baby dragons delivered safe and sound? Or will they be lost in Brooklyn forever? 

This powerful, intensely dramatic book is the definitive account of the Haitian Revolution of 1794-1803. It is the story of the French colony of San Domingo, a place where the brutality of master toward slave was commonplace and ingeniously refined. And it is the story of a barely literate slave named Toussaint L'Ouverture, who led the black people of San Domingo in a successful struggle against successive invasions by overwhelming French, Spanish, and English forces and, in the process, helped form the first independent nation in the Caribbean. 

Come sit on the veranda and pour yourself a glass of sweet tea, fortified with a slug of bourbon. Put your feet up and enjoy these stories set in Atlanta, a city sewn from the ashes, where everything that grows is both fertilized and corrupted by the past.

Claire is only seven years old when her college-age sister, Alison, disappears on the last night of their family vacation at a resort on the Caribbean island of Saint X. Several days later, Alison’s body is found in a remote spot on a nearby cay, and two local men - employees at the resort - are arrested. But the evidence is slim, the timeline against it, and the men are soon released. The story turns into national tabloid news, a lurid mystery that will go unsolved. For Claire and her parents, there is only the return home to broken lives.

The astonishing untold history of America's first Black millionaires - former slaves who endured incredible challenges to amass and maintain their wealth for a century, from the Jacksonian period to the Roaring '20s - self-made entrepreneurs whose unknown success mirrored that of American business heroes such as Henry Ford, John D. Rockefeller, and Thomas Edison.

Businessman Cash Outlaw has inherited almost all of his late mother’s Wyoming ranch, but still needs the 50 acres left to her former caretaker. As negotiations with beautiful, determined Brianna Banks become much more intimate, she reveals she’ll only sell him the property, if he gives her a baby. Cash’s counteroffer? That the mother of his child must become his wife.

His journey is meticulously documented through detailed accounts of his time secluded behind the doors of the recording studio as well as his days on tour. With unprecedented access to the musicians, singers, and studio engineers who knew Prince best, including members of the Revolution and the Time, Duane Tudahl weaves an intimate saga of an eccentric genius and the people and events who helped shape the groundbreaking music he created. From Sunset Sound Studios' daily recording logs and the Warner Bros. vault of information, Tudahl uncovers hidden truths and reveals details about Prince's unreleased outtakes.

In The Half Has Never Been Told, historian Edward E. Baptist reveals the alarming extent to which slavery shaped our country politically, morally, and most of all, economically. Until the Civil War, our chief form of innovation was slavery. Through forced migration and torture, slave owners extracted continual increases in efficiency from their slaves, giving the country a virtual monopoly on the production of cotton, a key raw material of the Industrial Revolution.

In this brilliant sequel to The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. - an enthralling, history-bending adventure traversing time and space, fact and fiction, magic and science co-written with number one New York Times best-selling author Neal Stephenson - a daring young time traveler must return to Jacobean England to save the modern world. This fast-paced sequel to the New York Times best-selling near-future adventure The Rise and Fall of D.O.D.O. picks up where the original left off.